Saints of the Christianization Age of Central Europe: Tenth to Eleventh Centuries

Passion of Saint Wenceslas by Gumpold of Mantua [Includes Image Plate]

PASSION OF SAINT WENCESLAS BY GUMPOLD OF MANTUA Fig. 1. Duke Wenceslas is crowned by Christ and venerated by Queen Emma, wife of Boleslav II. Illumination to the Passion of St. Wenceslas by Gumpold of Mantua. Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel, Cod. Guelph 11.2 Aug. 4º, fol. 18v. [19] PREFACE Marina Miladinov Wenceslas of Bohemia was assassinated in 935 and was soon to become the first Slavic saint, as well as to play a prominent role in the creation of the medieval cult of holy rulers.1 According to some sources,2 it was his very murderer, his younger brother Boleslav I, who instigated Wenceslas’s veneration by ordering a solemn translation of the holy remains and their deposition in the church of St Vitus in Prague, which Wenceslas himself had founded. This event probably took place early in the 960s as a step in the creation of the Prague bishopric (973) and its exemption from the jurisdiction of Regensburg, and is attested in several sources: the existence of the cult is briefly mentioned in tenth- and eleventh-century writings such as Widukind of Corvey’s Res gestae saxonicae and two early vitae of Saint Adalbert.3 What appears to have been a purely political murder soon took on the quality of martyrdom, which was the case with several assassinated rulers in that period: in Western Europe, the parallels include Edmund, king of East Anglia (d. 870), and Edward the Martyr, king of the English (d. 979, and proclaimed saint as early as three years after his assassination), as well as the 1 Gábor Klaniczay, Holy Rulers and Blessed Princesses: Dynastic Cults in Medieval Central Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 100. 2 See p. 55, n. 3. 3 Widukindi Res gestae Saxonicae 50, MGH SSrG 60, 68. Johannes Canaparius, S. Adalberti, Pragensis episcopi et martyris, vita prior 8, MPH n.s. IV/1, 13; Bruno of Querfurt, Passio sancti Adalberti episcopi et martyris 8, MPH n.s. IV/2, 27. On the role of the earliest hagiography in the foundation of the Prague bishopric, see Jan Kalivoda, “Nejstarší svatováclacská hagiografie v evropském literárním kontextu přelomu tisícletí” [The oldest hagiography of St Wenceslas in the European literary context of the turn of the millenium], in Svatý Václav. Na památku 1100. výročí narození knížete Václava Svatého, ed. Petr Kubín (Prague: Univerzita Karlova v Praze and Arcibiskupství pražské, 2010), 51–61. PASSION OF SAINT WENCESLAS BY GUMPOLD OF MANTUA 20 somewhat later Olaf Haraldsson, king of Norway (d. 1030), whose cult flourished immediately after his death.1 An especially important parallel in Eastern Europe, in which fratricide also played a prominent role, is that of the Russian princes Boris and Gleb, sons of Vladimir, ruler of Kievan Rus, both of whom were murdered in 1015, probably at the order of their brother Svyatopolk for reasons of political rivalry; their cult began to develop as early as four years after their death.2 This fast development of the cult speaks clearly of the appeal and the popularity of the royal martyr as a saintly type. In Wenceslas’s case, the commemoration of his death on September 28 seems to have become the major feast day after the harvest, and Cosmas of Prague speaks of a “multitude of people” flocking to the cathedral “like bees to their hive,” so that by 1060 the rotunda of St Vitus was no longer sufficient to hold the crowds and Duke Spytihnĕv decided to demolish it together with the mausoleum of St Adalbert and construct a new Romanesque church for both patron saints.3 The cult of the royal martyr spread quickly throughout the Empire, contributing to the intentional creation of Ottonian dynastic cults. Dušan Třeštík has pointed out that the Vita Mathildis reginae posterior is the only hagiography from the Ottonian period that 1 See Erich Hoffmann, Die heiligen Könige bei den Angelsachsen und den skandina­ vischen Völkern. Königsheilige und Königshaus (Neumünster: Wachholtz, 1975). 2 See especially Marina Yurievna Paramonova, “Heiligkeit und Verwandtschaft: Die dynastischen Motive in den lateinischen Wenzelslegenden und den Legenden der Boris und Gleb,” in Fonctions sociales et politiques du culte des saints dans les sociétés de rite grec et latin au Moyen Âge et à l’époque moderne. Approche comparative, ed. Marek Derwich and...